Original Letter

France.

13th Feby 1918.

My Dearest Sweetheart:–

‘Good mornage, Facteur’. Here is one to talk to you, Mary o’ mine, one who loves you and is most unusual dam’ unhappy when away from you. For I do not seem to get over the parting from you last Friday so very easily and I wish now that I had stayed until the next morning. Later on probably, it will be the glad part of my holiday that I shall remember, but just now it is the sad part – leaving you. But, you have troubles of your own.

It is mighty cosy here albeit very stuffy and inclined to be smelly but we can’t have everything. Personally I am more than willing to sacrifice light and fresh air for safety. We shift again in a day or so but that only makes it more interesting especially in a new place.

My book ‘Georges à Paris’ was more or less a flimmer. It seems to be one of a two or three book series – the middle one – and I don’t like it much anyway. It was very easy to read though with the help of my dictionnaire.

I don’t want to talk about a thing but you. I can’t think of anything else but you, Dearest. I have wondered hundreds of times in the last few days why I did not turn around at the corner on Chateaubriand and go back to you. God knows I wanted to and I have regretted ever since that I didn’t do it. But if I had I suppose that I would have been so worried over my wrongdoing that I would not have been a bit comfortable. Any man with a conscience should never work for the King – it is too exacting and gets into the blood.

I suppose that the facteur will bring you this while you are at lunch – well – do you know that I am far more homesick than I have ever been before in my life? Not sick for a home but for you. Why did you let me come back, Dear, there are lots of places there where you could have hidden me – sous le lit for preference – at least for second preference.

Dearest, I adore you with every tiny bit of me. Will you give me a little kiss at all, like the one you did give me in the tunnel?

Your own

Ross

Paris

Note

Paris is mentioned frequently in the letters, since it is the central point of the railway system; all travel in France goes through Paris. Mary accompanied Ross to Paris when he was going to the front initially and again after his leave in Bernay.

Although the flavour of Paris as a charming and cosmopolitan city is well known, in wartime Paris had a very particular character, which is captured by the American journalist, William Beebe, in his June 1918 article, “A Naturalist in Paris,” in Atlantic Monthly:

In these days when the very life and existence of individuals and nations are at hair-trigger poise, it is well to have lived in Paris and at the Front. One longs to be in both places at once. Yet there is a veritable monotony of excitement in the first lines: we can kill in only a certain number of ways, and one has a fixed number of limbs and organs to be injured. But behind the lines, in Paris, the ways of living, of physical and mental healing, of readjustment, of temporary despair and sorrow, of eternal hope, of selfishness and altruism – these are myriad in number and wholly absorbing in interest. ...

Walking along the boulevards of Paris one feels somehow as if one had slipped back into mediaeval times, the emphasis of color and ornament is so reversed. Almost every man is clad in bright hues, or with some warm splash or stripe, and most are adorned with medals and citations. So many women are in dark colors, if not in crape, that one’s thought of their costumes in general is of sombreness of hue.

... One’s geography of Paris would read: the city is bounded on the north by supply dépôts, on the south by hospitals, and on the west by aerodromes. Its principal imports and exports are bandages, crape, wooden legs, and Colonials; its products are war-bread, war-literature, faith, and hope.

Source: “William Beebe: World War One Witness (The Atlantic Monthly, 1918),” old magazine articles.com, http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/pdf/Naturalist-in-Paris%20Pt.pdf, accessed 12 February 2008.